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Q&A

The Smitten Word

How do you create your recipes?Sometimes I’m inspired by a cookbook, other times it’s something I had at a restaurant that really got me thinking. I always say I get a lot of ideas in the car. I don’t drive—my husband’s always doing the driving—and I’m looking out the window, and I’m like, “I wanna make rye English muffins.”

How many recipes in your cookbook haven’t appeared on your blog before?Over 85 percent are new. I didn’t want to just recopy my blog, I wanted it to be a value for the people who had been reading the site all these years, some who’ve asked for a cookbook. So there’s just a handful of site favorites, and they’re not even the most popular recipes, they’re ones that I feel strongly say what I’m trying to say about food. If I just picked the most popular recipes, the entire book would’ve been chocolate and peanut butter.

What are you making for Thanksgiving this year? We have two large families, and they host Thanksgiving, so I actually don’t host. I’m in charge of dessert. So, although I love Thanksgiving food and cook it a lot, I’ve really never done a proper turkey, which is kind of incredible. There are definitely a lot of recipes that really came out of my dessert trials at Thanksgiving. One of them is the cheesecake-marbled pumpkin gingersnap tart. It’s my idea of putting all my favorite pumpkin desserts into one. Another is the deepest-dish apple pie. It’s an apple pie that you suspend in a springform pan, so it just makes this enormous beast.

Does your 3-year-old help out in the kitchen?It depends on your definition of help. He likes hanging out there. He likes to ride his trike through. He was helping me peel hard-boiled eggs the other day, though that backfired when he got into the fridge the next day and decided he wanted to peel some hard-boiled eggs. We were all out of hard-boiled eggs, we just had regular eggs. I applaud his enthusiasm, while cleaning up his messes.